JAC Volume 20 Issue 4

In The Pasteurization of France, a canonical study of Louis Pasteur's influence on medicine and culture in nineteenth-century France, Bruno Latour observes, "The activity of discovering something is the same as that of commanding a network of equivalences. In this sense Pasteur has discovered his microbes just as Edison did his electricity. . . . That is, microbes and electricity were not so much at first. It is only when they added as many attributes as were necessary to interest everyone and to render their laboratories indispensable to the microbes and electricity, and only when they fought like devils to win attribution trials, that Pasteur and Edison ended up having discovered something."

What made Latour's study so novel in science studies when it appeared in the late 1980s was its close examination of what Latour (and others) called the work of "translation"—translation of the language and thought styles of others (such as hygienists, country doctors, and veterinarians) into the language and thought style of Pasteur, specifically Pasteurian bacteriology. But translation represents much more than nomenclatural change; the term also refers to the process of "enlistment": the bringing of others into one's camp vis à vis practices and ideology.

The concept of translation is at the heart of Charles Bazerman's The Languages of Edison's Light, a new book that examines the various "languages" or representational systems that gave a habitation and a name to Thomas Edison's invention of the incandescent electric light. Bazerman's object of study is the representational activity surrounding the instantiation of the meaning(s) of incandescent light technology within numerous discursive systems. These include the United States patent office, the scientific and technical journals of the time, the law courts where patents were contested and decisions concerning proprietary rights were adjudicated, the news media, New York City's Tammany Hall, and the handsomely illustrated catalogue pages where the new technology was packaged and marketed for the middle and affluent classes.

I don't mean to suggest that Bazerman's historical study of the role that the above systems played in the eventual mass consumption of incandescent light technology is similar to Latour's study of the cast of human and non-human actors that brought about the spread of laboratory practices into the public health system and even into France's colonizing activities. On the contrary, Bazerman's book "follows the texts" rather than "following the actors," an important conceptual distinction in science and technology studies. In The Pasteurization of France, translation is accomplished as the language and conceptual systems of various groups of actors (hygienists, physicians) pass through Pasteur's laboratory to be reconstituted as Pasteurian terminology and methods. This is the process through which Pasteur's thought-style, language, and methods were adopted by so many others whose labor was essential to spreading the Pasteurian paradigm throughout France. In The Languages of Edison's Light, however, the work of translation is not in the laboratory; translation is from the laboratory to other sites. Lab knowledge, instantiated in the form of the incandescent light bulb, must take on meaning or value particular to a number of "fields." As it is being developed, the technology takes on various material and/or symbolic attributes, becoming different "things" in different contexts: a stock market surge in Edison stock, a successful patent application, an elegant display of lighting at the Paris World Exhibition, the Pearl Street power station in New York City, the first Edison companies, and the elegant floral fixtures that graced the homes and hotels of the affluent in the 1880s. Translation in The Languages of Edison's Light is, then, a quintessentially discursive as well as rhetorical activity. Without the textual dynamics of the newspaper articles, correspondence with financial backers, collaborative laboratory notebooks, patent applications, agreements with competitors, and legal briefs, the technology of the incandescent electric light (and the infrastructure that provides it) would have remained in Edison's notebooks and patent applications. The textual activity that Bazerman meticulously traces from numerous documents in the Edison papers, and from other archival sources, enables the reader to view the processes through which Edison's empire developed, with Edison (like Pasteur) becoming a cultural icon by the end of the nineteenth century. Bazerman's unique reworking of "translation," a canonical concept in science and technology studies, locates his project at the cutting edge of both social studies of science and technology and the rhetoric of science and technology—a point I shall return to later.

From the beginning of the race with numerous competitors to come up with a workable incandescent light filament, power generator, and electricity delivery system, Edison worked not only with his laboratory team, but also with his lawyer and secretary in writing patent applications and meeting with reporters and other visitors. Edison's labors, then, weren't limited to the laboratory; he also spent considerable time attracting and bringing on board a number of allies—his laboratory collaborators, financial backers, the British and French press, patent examiners, patent court judges, and New York City alderman, among others—to support and promote his work, and, more importantly, to overcome various obstacles that stood in his way. These "obstacles"—which included rival inventors (such as William Sawyer and his backer, Albon Man, as well as Hiram Maxim and Joseph Swan in France and England), skeptical backers, potentially hostile judges, fastidious patent examiners, various scientists, Tammany Hall politicians, and other individuals—had to be sued, wooed, bought off, bribed, and/or marshaled into Edison's camp. In order to win presence in the media, the stock markets, the fairs and exhibits, and New York political centers, and to win his proprietary claims over the emergent incandescent technology, Edison had to enlist (or demolish) all of these rivals, skeptics, and competing interests. He had to use all available means of persuasion—discursive, material, economic, and political—first to patent his technology, and then to protect his patent claims while he and his collaborators developed the infrastructure for delivering electric light technology to American homes and communities.

Despite the considerable publicity Edison generated for his invention, it was not until late 1879 that he was able to demonstrate the incandescent light bulb to his backers, a delay that led to considerable consternation among some investors during the long year between late 1878 and October 22, 1879. On that date, the Edison team delivered a carbon thread filament that would not catch fire, enabling the filament to glow for many hours in the vacuum of the bulb. Bazerman traces the history of the patenting of the incandescent light and describes in detail several other sites where the invention takes on different kinds of signification, including the demonstrations at the Menlo Park lab; the 1881 Paris International Exhibition of Electricity (where Edison manipulates, makes deals, and lobbies with competitors, judges, and journalists to have his system of lighting become the unquestioned centerpiece of the technology exhibits); the American and British technical and scientific journals; the Pearl Street power station, a central installation for the lighting of New York City; Edison's manufacturing companies (later to be merged into one corporation, General Electric); and, finally, the catalogues and department stores where ornamental floral electroliers and other decorative fixtures were specifically designed to be tokens of European tastes and feminine refinement. In each of these contexts, incandescent lighting takes on different material and semiotic attributes that stand in for situated meanings and intelligibility.

Although I'm not going to describe each of the chapters in Bazerman's complex narrative, I'd like to comment briefly on four chapters that illustrate Bazerman's use of theory-laden historical (archival) research methods. These are the chapters dealing with the distributed labor and cognition of the lab, and the patent application and adjudication process. In these chapters, Bazerman draws concepts from activity theory and speech act theory to shape his narrative. In the lab, the work of invention is collaboratively distributed among the various participants who have different roles in the project—from PhD scientists in physics and chemistry, to technicians, to Edison's secretary. Using illustrations and text from the various Menlo Park laboratory notebooks, Bazerman documents the role of the notebooks as an external record and as an essential element in the discovery process unfolding over the course of 1878-79. His account and the book's illustrations of notebook pages vividly demonstrate the concepts of distributed cognition and Lev Vygotsky's "zone of proximal development." In two later chapters ("Patents as Speech Acts and Legal Objects" and "Patent Realities: Legal Stabilization of Indeterminate Texts"), Bazerman draws on, but adapts to his own purposes, John R. Searle's taxonomy of speech acts. Although Searle and J.L. Austin before him were attempting to categorize spoken utterances that carried "force" for the listeners and that made things happen, such as marriages or christenings, Bazerman is concerned rather with the performative function of the documents that constitute the patent system and those documents that are part of legal disputes over patents. So, Bazerman is concerned not with the individual utterance as much as he is with the performative function of genres in discursive systems or networks—the latter being a much larger unit of analysis than Austin or Searle would have contemplated. Bazerman's method in these chapters is controversial; however, he makes a compelling argument for regarding systems of texts as being made up of multiple genres, each of which functions performatively within the system.

Bazerman waits until the final chapter to discuss the theoretical scaffolding for the book. The theories that underlie his narrative of Edison's achievements are quite diverse and include: speech act theory; actor-network theory; activity theory; and the concept of "heterogeneous engineering," borrowed from technology studies in sociology (which Bazerman appropriates as "heterogeneous symbolic engineering"). While Bazerman's theoretical eclecticism may disturb some readers, I would argue that The Languages of Edison's Light is of necessity theoretically multidimensional: it had to be heterogeneous and capacious to accommodate the scope of Bazerman's ambitious intellectual work of "reverse engineering," a project that took ten years to complete. Confronted with the larger-than-life figure of Thomas Edison and the "black boxes" that Edison's invention quickly became after the inventor won the proprietary right to patent incandescent lighting technology, Bazerman needed the means to investigate the diverse kinds of discursive activity that brought Edison's light into being. This activity took place over time and within the other symbolic systems through which incandescent light (and its infrastructure) became intelligible to different sorts of individuals and markets. In short, Bazerman needed to use a variety of conceptual and analytical tools to make intelligible to readers the very processes of intelligibility that incandescent lighting took between the critical years of 1878 to 1892.

In the final chapter, Bazerman also mounts a challenge to conventional scholarship in the rhetoric of science and technology—scholarship that draws on venerable concepts from classical and contemporary rhetoric. Arguing from the case study that his book represents, Bazerman asserts that in order to study the multiple forms of discursive activity that permeated the development, patenting, implementing, and marketing of electric light technology, a "rhetoric cannot be a closed and fixed techne offering standard advice about a limited set of practices. Rather, the tools for analyzing and offering advice about communicative actions must be sensitive to the full range of forces, forms, and systems that influence each particular instance, and to the position and influences of each participant. . . . This necessary openness and heterogeneity provides a challenge to rhetorical theory, which historically has tended toward unified, homogeneous accounts and advice based on particular social circumstances and have been taken to be more general than they are." Bazerman seems to be suggesting that not only is the conventional rhetorical approach to studying technoscience and its surrounding textual dynamics problematic, but it suffers as well from parochialism, my word for the phenomenon he's describing.

The man may have a point. For example, if we look to other varieties of science and technology studies, we find that, surprisingly, the "semiotic turn" in the human sciences that has influenced the essentially rhetorical work of Latour, Michel Callon, John Law, Susan Leigh Star, and others has been largely ignored in the conventional rhetoric of science and technology research that is conducted in the humanities. While such disregard may signify disciplinary snobbery, recent accounts by Steve Fuller and others suggest that classical and contemporary rhetorical approaches to science and technology are too narrow in scope to be of interest to sociologists and anthropologists of science and technology, researchers whose approaches are generally interdisciplinary and eclectic.

Bazerman's approach is marked by just these qualities, and this is one of the reasons that The Languages of Edison's Light is such a commanding scholarly work. The research in the book forges a long-overdue and badly needed link between the fields of rhetorical studies of science and technology, on the one hand, and social studies of science and technology, on the other. The Languages of Edison's Light sets a high-water mark for serious, interdisciplinary, rhetorical research in the new millennium.